Apple clearly has no idea…

… how the world outside of California actually works and this all seems so familiar to me…

Ok, short story: I moved to Switzerland in January and I have an iPhone or two. So I did buy a lot of music and apps throught the crappy shit, Apple calls an Application a.k.a iTunes.

Having a new address, bank account and of course credit card, I changed all the details on my iTunes account to save me the trouble of managing two accounts. One for Germany and one for Switzerland. All the apps are available in both countries, actually.

In the last weeks I noticed the number of updates on the notification bubble within iTunes keeps rising, while the update page doesn’t show any updates at all. When accessing the AppStore from the phone it still shows alle available updates.

So I did the only thing I could do and asked Apple for support.

Strange behavior with App Updates

The App page in iTunes shows a number of available updates for my purchased apps (currently 11). When clicking on the show available updates button it says no updates available.

When accessing the AppStore through my iPhone or iPad I get a list of all the updates to install.What are the details, including any error messages, related to your question?

The usual KB answer didn’t actually help, but it was a nice try

thank you for the information.

Is it possible that you have downloaded the apps with a different account ? Because if yes , you need to sign in with this account you have downloaded the apps to get updates for the other apps. You can check it with presses cmd+i (ctrl+i).

So, it tried to explain the problem again

… well, I really tried

Actually I changed my account from Germany to Switzerland when I moved here to avoid having a second account for no reason.

But for some reason it didn’t work

Now you need to look with which account you downloaded the apps. With this account you can just make the updates. In my previous mail i explained you the steps. Please take a look again.

Thank you for your patience !

With patience being the one thing that runs very thin, very quickly if I have to repeat myself too often, I replied.

It’s The Same Account! I just changed The Country and Home Address of it.

and got a very upsetting answer from the support

Thank you for your email.

After changing the country, some apps can’t be updated any longer and need to be purchases again. The contents of the App Store is country specific. If you want to upgrade programs, please do so before the change of the country. If you have changed the country of your account, you can use programs that you have purchased with the previous country setting, no longer update. I’m very sorry for that information.

Thank you very much for your patience.

Well, unlike most parts of the US, Europe does have borders to other countries… lots of them. Travelling between countries is practically an everyday event. Moving to another country is concidered as a „normal“ process.

Ok, so I didn’t move within the European Union, but to Switzerland. Still I just had to register at the local city bureau and fill some forms.

But back to the lab.. or the scrapyard, that resembles iTunes.

I have an account. I buy music and software licenses with this account. Reason would tell me the licenses are linked to this account. If I now take this account and move it to another country, the licenses should not be affected by this, since they are linked to the account.

Taken the answer I got from Apple support: I moved the account to Switzerland, losing the link to all applications I bought in Germany over the years. But, since I can still access them via phone it implicates, that this process created a second account with the same credentials in Switzerland.

Which is… to say lightly: „Bullshit by design“

First of all: I already bought the license, wether or not the software/music is available in Switzerland! From my point of view, not giving me access to updates or the ability to recover lost files by downloading them again comes very close to thievery.